he woman with the neck tattoo picks nervously at the edges of an empty coffee cup, a knee bobbing up and down, as she talks about the corner where she was taken.

“I was 11 years old when I turned my first trick,” Heather K. says from inside a bustling Starbucks in Bradenton. It’s a weekday afternoon. She surveys the room. A businessman is yapping into his phone’s earpiece, and a barista is clapping metal and conjuring steam. She tamps the cup down into the table.

“Once I was picked up,” Heather says, “the next thing you know I’m in Miami, and I’m in a shed.”

She was a student at Robert H. Prine Elementary in Bradenton.

Heather’s last name is not being printed because she fears someone from her past will find her and hurt her.

Now 37, Heather seems incapable of judgment. She estimates she has been arrested 300 times. If her arrests were pins on a map of the country, nearly every major city would be accounted for. With such a record, the only work she could land was that of a hairstylist, which she enjoys. Heather laughs here and there, for irony, as she narrates the story of her abduction at 11, and the 17 years that followed.

Abduction may not be the precise word. She clarifies: No one clubbed her over the head and dragged her to the car. She got in. The car pulled up a few miles from here, on a corner along Tamiami Trail, where she was hiding away from her stepfather, who chronically raped her.

“I ran away when I could,” she says. “It was better to be anywhere but my house.”

She did what she thought she must.

“My first trick was for food. I hadn't eaten in a week. I was already being abused. I might as well be paid for it. That's what I thought. I was brainwashed.” – Heather K.

Heather doesn’t share her story; she lobs it unapologetically, as if to say: “These are the facts. Deal with it.”

She was prostituted throughout Florida, in Denver, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York and Utah. She doesn’t cite years, but she knows she was in Seattle when police caught the Green River Killer, Gary Leon Ridgway. He was convicted of killing 48 women and girls in Washington during the 1980s and 1990s, many of them alleged prostitutes. That was in 2001.

She was transported all over by her pimp, Eugene, whom she referred to as her boyfriend. When she was arrested, Eugene would bail her out — most of the time. Eugene instructed her not to cooperate with police, so she didn’t. Eugene beat her and gave her drugs. Sometimes, she thought he loved her, that he protected her. Other times she knew better. When she sensed a john intended to harm her, Heather jumped out of the car, as Eugene had taught her. No matter the circumstance, she always came back to the life, to the drugs, to Eugene. Earlier this year, she says Eugene tried to contact her on Facebook.

That ironic chuckle has disappeared. She looks beyond the coffee shop, over its busy patrons, through the glass and into the street that claimed her.

“It happens right here,” she says. “Every day. There are girls out here, 13, 14. There’s pimps right up and down these streets. People are very doubtful that this is happening in my city.”

She wishes people could notice what she knows.

“You want to see?” she says. “I can show you.”

T

he dashboard clock reads 11:29 p.m. as the minivan’s beams break open the unlit road, revealing nearly a dozen girls walking up and down the block, a few men scattered among them. CLICK. Laurie Swink, the co-founder of Selah, locks the doors as she steers through.

“Look at all this trick traffic here,” Heather K. says.

A girl — she could be 15 or 18 — is wearing tight pink cotton sweatpants and waddling at the edge of the pavement, an arm’s length ahead of a bearish man in a tank top. The man is wearing a flimsy purple hat on his head, a gold chain around his neck. He drifts fluidly, like a shadow, behind her.

At the end of this stretch — 13th Street, just off the Tamiami Trail in Bradenton — the minivan turns around and doubles back.

“She might have gone into a car,” Heather says. “She’s gone. Underage girls — out here — they get picked up so fast. You see how young she is?”

The traffic is blatant, obvious and unmistakable.

Swink pulls the van into the nearby gas station. Heather gets out to buy an orange soda, and as she ambles into the shop, Swink grips the steering wheel tightly and looks into her rearview, at a car across the street. A Bradenton police officer is sitting in his patrol car. As Heather exits the shop, the man with the purple hat and gold chains struts through, behind the girl in pink sweats.

Swink pulls the minivan up the street, along the trail, to a nearby Kwik Stop. There, a girl in a white skirt and a pink shirt is sitting on a concrete parking block. A young man on a bicycle rides in concentric, lazy circles in front of her, looking around, the way vultures glide over warm air.

Swink parks the van at the edge of the lot. The girl stands up and walks away from the man and toward the van, staggering as she finds an efficient course over broken concrete. Heather reaches for a pen and paper and hurriedly jots down her cellphone number because she doesn’t have a business card. She rolls down the window and smiles.

“I see you sitting out here,” she says, her tone maternal. “And you’re so precious, and you have so much value.”

The girl peeks in, her pimples and thick makeup visible from the van’s interior light. The girl looks like she should be at home buried in stuffed animals and thick blankets, or maybe texting a boy from school, or studying for an algebra exam. But she is here, nodding feebly and staring a great, long distance at nothing.

“How old are you?” Heather asks.

“Twenty,” the girl recites.

“I used to be on these streets, too,” Heather tells her. She hands the girl the scrap paper and tells her to call if she needs anything at all, and the girl drops the paper into her bra and walks away awkwardly, as if her legs were not her own to command.

The window up, Heather answers the question.

“She’s not 20,” she says. “Maybe 15.”

The van pulls away as Heather talks to herself. “You see the look in her eyes?” She’s interpreting now. “Help me.”

A few seconds pass before an SUV pulls up, its brake lights illuminating the transaction. The girl enters.

Less than a block away, two patrol cars are stopped with their lights on, the officers talking to each other.

amille Johnson’s katana has shed no blood. This is a fact Johnson attributes not to her discretion or grace, but rather to an act of God.

The day after Moe returned, she and Camille drove to the townhome where Moe had stayed. Johnson pounded on the door. Inexplicably, Johnson says, she forgot the sword in the car as she confronted Jennifer Williams. Another time, Johnson was styling hair while watching Moe dance outside the salon. A much older man came up to her daughter, and after a few words, he punched her in the face. The blow knocked Moe to the ground.

“I was ready to use it,” the mother says, but she took the sticky door as a sign.

“I wanted to kill them,” she says. “Decapitation. Castration. But I had to sit back and let the Lord take care of it.”

Johnson ascends from the rickety table in the corner of the salon and walks to her barber’s chair. She must tend to a customer now, but she continues to talk as she drapes an apron over the other woman.

Camille Johnson had her first child at 14.

Johnson is 43 with five kids — two boys and three girls, ages 19 to 28. She had the first at 14, which is why she cuts hair. It’s all she knew how to do.

“I did everything I could to help my baby,” Johnson says. “But not knowing, I couldn’t give her the help she needs. I didn’t know. I had no idea. And it sucks …”

“Should I come back?” the customer interjects.

“It’s OK,” Johnson insists. “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

She lathers a bleach paste on the woman’s roots and sits down once more.

“Never in a million years did I think Charlie would touch her,” she says, grimacing, crumbling beneath her words. She’s staring up, as if into a rearview, into some incomprehensible regret. “Never.”

She snaps back, as she is apt to do.

“If it takes for me to go to hell for my own, I’ll do it,” she shouts. “They got a right to be kids. They shouldn’t have to live worried someone is going to touch them in an inappropriate way.”

Johnson says she just wants her daughter back.

“I can hear it in her voice, when I know she’s giving up.”

Johnson wonders aloud if the county fair might cheer her up. When Moe was little, she loved the fair.

“I ain’t seen her smile in a long time,” she says. “A real. Genuine. Smile.”